


Six Days to Sunrise

by ChocolatePecan



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canon Divergence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mercy Killing, Mutation, Poor Noct, Poor Prompto, We'll always have the afterlife, alternative ending, count the hugs, daemonised chocobro, not nearly enough for this level of agony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 01:45:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13648851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocolatePecan/pseuds/ChocolatePecan
Summary: “You promised you’d always be at my side,” Noct forces. “This is practically treason.”“I wanted to be.” Prompto's laugh lilts. “That scourge, though.”“You should be coming home.” It’s hard for Noct to control his breathing. “Fallen soldiers come home.”





	1. Six

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the wonderful anon who submitted this prompt to the kink meme:
> 
> 'From the final fight with Ardyn:
> 
> "I was so close... so very close to taking those friends of yours... and making them into daemons."
> 
> Let's say Ardyn succeeded. Which bro (or all of them) and how far they're gone is up to you, as well as any ships. I just really wanna see some sweet mercykilling angst.'
> 
> I hope this floats your boat, lovely :)
> 
> As always, thanks and worship go to kay_cricketed, who is still my favourite chocobro <3

Hammerhead gleams in the distance, a floodlit beacon of familiarity in a fallen world. Noct still feels lightheaded for shock. Ten years. Time in the crystal must have passed differently to time on the outside. It doesn’t feel like such a long time, only like a good night’s sleep. His legs are a little sore for having been huddled up, but only as though he’d been in the car for a long journey. He remembers snatches of conversation with Bahamut – _rest, grow strong, be ready_ – interspersed with gentle memories of a tent, four chairs, and a group of three stalwart brothers. He smiles as he thinks of seeing them again.

Thunder Bombs and Galvanades have lingered close to the road the whole way, and he’s watched the forge-hot blades of Red Giants strutting across the desert at every turn. The daemons are many, and they are strong. He’s sure he hears them laughing: _here is the King of Light, returned to rule over the despairing and decayed._

It’s not until Talcott takes the kitty corner that Noct starts to see the rot here in Hammerhead, just as he’s seen it out of the corner of his eye the whole journey long. It’s in the paint of the outpost sign as it peels, in the dirt and spores left turning to glue on the forecourt of the Coernix Station. He cranes against the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Cindy working a car at the garage, maybe Prompto lingering at her shoulder.

Talcott won’t tell him anything about Prompto. He was happy to tell him about Gladio’s hunting and Ignis’ gourmet seafood, and Noct is glad for every mention of them. But on Prompto Talcott won’t be drawn.

“It’s better you ask the guys,” was all he’d said. He’d looked away from the road for a second then, biting his lip into the side mirror before looking back at Noct with a taut smile.

Noct hopes the rot doesn’t go any deeper, but in a world of perpetual night he expects nothing else.

When he climbs down from the truck he sees Ignis and Gladio making their way slowly towards him, as though they imagine he might disappear. One has a topknot a samurai would be proud of. The other is blind but moving without the support of a cane. This feels more like coming home than any other part of this evening, and Noct smiles at them both. But it’s not lost on him that one of his stalwarts is missing.

“Hey,” he says. He doesn’t know how else to break the ice after ten years of crystal dreaming.

“Hey? That’s all you’ve got to say for yourself, after all this time?” Gladio puts a hand on Noct’s shoulder and shoves in play. Noct rolls with it, rolling his eyes at the same time.

“Well, well. You kept us waiting.” Ignis tips his hand. Noct crosses to him, clasping his shoulder.

“Not like I wanted to.” He looks over Gladio’s shoulder to the diner. There’s still no sign of Prompto.

“And Prompto? He’s not having dinner rather than come see me, is he?”

Ignis has always been hard to read. With shades on he’s even harder. His jaw flexes though, and his chin lowers, and that’s all Noct needs to feel as though he’s trapped by a Shock Trooper about to self-destruct. Gladio reaches into his jacket pocket.

“This’ll tell you what’s going on as well as we can.” He passes the letter to Noct. “Sorry. We had to open it.”

Even if Noct couldn’t tell from Gladio’s stern expression, he’d know the letter didn’t mean anything good. The envelope’s seen better days, and it crinkles as he tucks it between his index and middle fingers so he can unfold the letter.

_Noct,_

_Buddy, I so wanted to be there when you came back. I’ve waited almost ten years. I know you’ve got to be near the end of sleepytimes now._

_I’m not going to make it to welcome you home._

_Turns out when you’re born in a Niff lab and spliced with the scourge, when you go out and contract it in the field it affects you differently. The turn is slower. Less painful, actually. More chronic. Didn’t know it, but I’ve been turning for weeks. Maybe months. Gods know how many people I might have infected. Just hoping I’m not some kind of crazy scourge beacon of epic doom. That would suck. I don’t want to take anyone else with me._

_Anyway, so I just wanted you to know that if you’re being handed this letter and I’m not there when you wake up, it’s not because I didn’t want to be. I did. I wanted it more than anything._

_I know you can do this, dude. ‘You are mankind’s only hope’, right? #truecliches. Never doubt it._

_Gooey stuff now: love ya, bro. Thanks for everything you ever did for me. It made me the man I am._

_I kinda like him._

_Prompto_

Noct reads it through a second time, wiling it to say something different. He must be wavering, as Gladio comes to stabilise him with a broad hand on his arm.

“How late am I?” Noct falters. “How much too late?”

“It’s better you don’t distress yourself,” Ignis says, but it’s too late for that.

“Tell me! How much did I miss him by? Weeks? Days?” He almost can’t bear to say it. “Hours?”

He remembers hundreds of happy hours. Of playing Kings Knight, of sharing study time and comic books with a kid who just couldn’t be quiet and who smiled almost compulsively. Of a blonde narrow at the shoulders and still waiting to grow into himself, tiny but packing a dead aim every marksman in Insomnia had been jealous of. Someone who took photographs because he loved every moment of living, and wanted to keep copies of them all like he understood what it meant for those moments to run out. The friend Ardyn had called his heart’s desire, the only person in his life who made him feel _normal_.

Noct shakes off Gladio’s grip. He can’t keep the tremor from his voice. “I should have been here earlier.” The letter crumples in his hand as he crosses to the truck, leaning up against it to get his breath.

He can’t imagine doing what he has to do without Prompto at his side.

Behind him he hears Gladio and Ignis talking between themselves, hushed and urgent.

“Don’t you let them cheat you, Prince!” Noct looks up to see Cindy striding towards them across the lot. She wears the jacket with its zip done up higher now, but there’s little trace that the decade has been unkind save for her current look of ire.

Her boots clack on the flagstones as she draws near. “These two’ll tighten like clams just to get you out on the road, but I think you got a right to know.”

If she sees Gladio’s anger or Ignis’ irritation, she ignores them. She flicks Gladio’s chest. “An you two oughta know better. Don’t you think Prompto deserves to see him one last time?”


	2. Five

The clock on the truck’s dashboard reads 06.12. Gladio is in the driving seat, having adjusted it to his own comfort.

“You weren’t going to tell me.” Noct squeezes his thumb into his palm. The pain of it is somewhere to focus his anger. “How could you not tell me he was alive?”

There’s an unvoiced sigh in Ignis’ response. “We don’t know that he is, Noct. We checked on him yesterday morning, but his condition is very advanced. He could already have daemonised.”

“You were going to let me go to war without knowing for sure!”

Gladio’s voice fills the overcrowded cab. “It’s not a matter of letting anything happen! Do you think we’d be _letting_ him suffer like this if there was any choice?”

Noct knows that’s true. They might have kept secret the fact that Prompto is still alive, but they wouldn’t keep aid from him. If there was any way to alleviate his suffering they’d have done it. Noct knows as well as anyone that the scourge is a death sentence, no matter how you contract it, and no matter when. That’s why he’s here. He’s to sacrifice himself to save his people, people like Prompto.

His thumb clicks under the pressure of his palm.

“Beating Ardyn… Will it change Prompto back?” He looks out of the window at the Thunder Bombs and the Grenades in tumult behind the trees and already knows the answer.

Ignis doesn’t shy from it, all the same. “Daemons don’t like daylight, but even when the sun was visible it didn’t have any curative powers.”

“But it will destroy the spores.”

“That’s likely to be the case, if the researcher’s findings are accurate.”

“So it might cure him?”

“Noct—”

“He’s not like the others, he said so himself! It might cure him!” Coming back after a decade can’t be about losing the people he loves. Sacrificing himself is the supreme embodiment of that love. He needs them to live when he can’t, to find meaning after the bleakness they’ve survived.

“I think you underestimate how far gone he is.” Ignis’ voice punctures his hopes. “The Prompto who wrote you that letter isn’t the Prompto you’re going to see.”

 

They drive for another three hours. Noct feels inordinately tired for a man who’s slept for ten years, and doesn’t know if it’s the emotion or the spores or the endless darkness. As they approach the Coernix Station at Cauthess, Noct can just make out broken windows and empty shelves. Any reserves it had were depleted years before. Black ash rests on everything in sight.

They park up at the petrol pumps.

“We’ll go on foot from here,” Ignis says as he climbs down. “It’s not far.”

The three of them cross the road towards a faded white building. The roaring of the local daemon population accompanies them, but strangely they stand aside, watchful. It’s like they’re waiting for an arrival.

Noct doesn’t think it’s his.

A red ‘X’ is daubed on the door. It’s visible for several hundred yards. Noct hasn’t been here for ten years, and even he recognises that as a symbol for plague. History wasn’t his favourite lesson but some things stuck out to a bored eight-year-old boy. He speeds up, knowing that Prompto is behind the door, but Gladio grabs his hand just as he reaches for the handle.

“Nuh-uh. Not you first.”

Ignis senses his way around them and reaches into his pocket for the key. Now that the grass isn’t rustling and the daemons have quieted, Noct can hear sounds coming from inside.

There’s a horrible echo unique to a board hut. Especially when the original sounds are the strangled breaths of somebody in pain.

Gladio pushes open the door first, slow and cautious. The noises pause, replaced by uneven panting.

“Prompto? It’s us, buddy. We… brought you somebody,” Gladio says, just as Noct pushes past him.

At the far end of the hut is a window set high on the right-hand side of the wall. Adjacent to it is a set of floor to ceiling vertical bars with a gate at the centre. The building was probably used as a gaol for thieves or bandits before the war, a temporary holding space until they could be handed over to the authorities. It’s hard to see much in the poor lighting, and the atmosphere above Eos blocks the moon just as easily as it does the sun. There is a moving point of light outside the window, and Noct is momentarily glad for Bombs.

It doesn’t last.

He can just make out a semi-naked body in the flickering light. It’s scored down the centre by a purple glow, and what he can see of the chest is sweating and heaving. There’s a pair of black trousers covering the lower body, and what looks like an old blanket.

“Prompto?” Noct asks, disbelieving.

Prompto gasps and lifts his head, gripping the bars tightly and pulling himself into the light. A purple glow lights his face when he opens his eyes, and whenever he blinks it disappears again. The left-hand side of his chest smoulders purple. The room smells like some of the dungeons did, the ones loaded with the highest number of daemons.

Gladio finishes lighting the lantern in the corner just as Noct reaches the cell and grasps for Prompto through the bars. Prompto is surprisingly fast as he shies away.

“Noct...” Prompto’s voice sounds disarmingly like Noct expects it to, but there’s an undercurrent, like he’s listening to somebody talk from another dimension. “Y-you woke up…”

“Yeah.” Noct leaves his hands on the ground on the far side of the bars. At least they’ve covered the concrete with hay. It should keep off the chill. He swallows. “Sorry I’m late.”

Prompto gives a thin laugh. “R-royal prerogative.”

“Yeah.” Noct grips his lower lip with his teeth to stop it trembling. “Guess so.”

In the light cast by the lantern it’s just possible to see bruises across most of Prompto’s body. They focus around the chest, but even his face is affected. The scourge has taken over his cells, turning his immune system against him.

Prompto’s voice breaks when he says, “You shouldn’t be here.” He shifts to his back, holding his body upright on his elbows like if he drops the position he’ll break. He whimpers, staring up into the roof space.

Noct doesn’t know what to tell him. He watches as Prompto turns agonisingly slowly and drags himself into the corner, keening with every movement. He flops face-down and finally cries “Shut off the light!”

Gladio does so like it’s a routine. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t criticise. He moves Noct out of the way while Ignis talks softly to Prompto, opening the gate set in the bars. It’s the first time Noct notices the satchel at his hip.

Ignis and Gladio lock themselves in. Ignis talks the whole time, telling Prompto what they’re doing. _Just a few injections, Prompto. They’ll help dull the pain. Are you warm enough? Do you need more blankets?_

Gladio fills a hypodermic syringe from a vial kept in the satchel and administers it. He has another shot lined up within a few seconds. Prompto offers nothing back except more sounds of pain, ending in a soft noise once Gladio finishes the trilogy of injections into the back of his leg. Hands gloved, Ignis tousles Prompto’s hair, then shifts his head so that his face is up and out of the hay.

His eyes are half-lidded, and Noct realises he’s drugged out of his mind. Gladio casts the blanket over him and the two men step out of the cell. Gladio shakes the door behind them to ensure it’s properly locked.

“It can’t be necessary to lock him up,” Noct says. He can’t take his eyes from his friend as his hand clenches and unclenches weakly on the hay.

“We found him a few days ago,” Ignis says. “He brought himself here. This is his choice.”

“Nobody chooses this,” Noct says. He bites down on his tongue to refocus himself and walks out into the evernight.


	3. Four

It’s too hard to sleep when you can hear your best friend sobbing a few hundred yards away. Instead, Noct sits on the haven with a blanket over his shoulders, watching the embers of the fire like they might take shape and offer him a solution.

They’d eaten Fisherman’s Favourite Paella slowly and deliberately that evening, huddled a little closer around the fire than Noct remembered as their habit. He’d insisted that they drag Prompto out to eat with them, but Ignis had shaken his head every time he was asked.

“Eating now will prolong the pain,” he’d said eventually, and as much as Noct had hated it he could see Ignis’ point. They hadn’t left him water, or food. Such deprivation was nature’s way of easing the passage through dying into death.

The razor’s edge of wanting to eat Ignis’ cooking again and yet having no appetite had almost brought Noct to tears. If his friends had noticed, they’d given him the grace of his grief without interference.

Noct hears the zip of the tent over the crack of a log. Ignis steps out, zipping the flap back down.

“Trouble sleeping?” Ignis asks.

As though cued, Prompto cries out from the darkness. It’s longer than the other cries have been, and Noct hears the tremor of despair that underpins it. He rolls his eyes and digs his fingertips into his palm.

Ignis pulls up a chair and sits. His voice is hollow. “I think they’re waiting for him.”

When questioned, Ignis tells Noct that the daemons around Cauthess are sentient and present, but show no aggression, something very unusual amongst daemons grown strong during the Long Night. They seem to be in a kind of stasis, awaiting instruction or animation – just as MTs had been when still plugged into their charging stations on the Empire’s flying fortresses. It’s as though they are waiting for somebody to lead them.

“Doesn’t Ardyn lead the daemons?”

“I afraid there are few clues about what that man is thinking, though he’s never shown any particular aptitude for leading.”

Noct sets his gaze back to the embers. “So, what you’re saying…” He swallows. “ _Prompto_ … is meant to be their leader?” Prompto’s letter resurfaces in Noct’s memory: _Just hoping I’m not some kind of crazy scourge beacon of epic doom. That would suck. I don’t want to take anyone else with me._

“I don’t know, Noct.” Ignis takes a deep breath, and sighs. “All I can tell you is that the behaviour of these daemons is not like any other we’ve fought. And the only thing that appears different about this area is Prompto.”

There’s another constricted cry in the darkness. Near the hut, the daemons hum and hover.

Ignis gets up to make a cup of Ebony. Beyond the clanks and rumbles of the water being boiled, there are no sounds of nature. No birds, no wildlife, not even the buzz of a Killer Bee. Lucis has shrunk to a black echo chamber filled with daemon growls and Prompto’s torment.

“We should wake Gladio.” Ignis offers Noct a cup without having asked if he wanted one. “It’s still early, but we can make good use of the extra time.”

Noct takes the cup. “I can’t leave Prompto like this.”

Ignis’ movements slow. “But… you understand the urgency? We must go to the Citadel.

“I can’t.” Noct bites down on the tin cup to still his jaw.

“Noct…” Ignis draws his chair closer to his king and sits. “I understand that this is difficult for you, and you are not alone. I have thought and thought for ways to cure him or to alleviate his suffering, but there is nothing. Indeed, if he is to become a beacon of the scourge as he feared, the very best thing we can do is leave here post-haste.”

Neither of them had heard the tent’s zip beyond their own thoughts.

Gladio’s voice is quiet. “How many doses of the meds did we bring, Iggy?” He begins dismantling the tent, pulling out the sleeping mat and tying up the guy lines.

“Enough for a few days. I was going to leave them for him.”

Gladio clatters at the tent for a few moments more before he faces them. “He won’t feel it, Noct. He’ll just… go out.” He slides one palm heavily over the other. His gaze shifts to the hut, and his brow crumples. “It’ll be more peaceful than this.”

Noct feels as though he’s woken up in another world, not just a changed one. “What are you saying?” His leg trembles under his fist.

“I think you know.”

“You can’t be serious. You want me to kill Prompto?”

“No! I want him at our side when we go home to Insomnia! But since we can’t have that, all we can do is put him out of his misery! Can’t you hear him? Does it sound like he’s having a good time in there?”

Noct can’t answer. He knows they’re all up so early for the same reason. Gladio turns back to the tent and continues his work, movements jagged.

As the three men grapple with the few choices they have, the Bombs and Grenades around the hut hiss and spin.

 

It doesn’t matter what arguments the other two men make. Noct can’t do it.

He does try to get used to the idea. He even takes the vials in hand and allows Gladio to show him the hows: how to dose the syringe, how to stretch the skin so the puncture is clean, how to decide what angle to jab from. But he can’t concentrate, and his hands won’t stay still, and so Gladio takes the drugs from him.

Ignis’ grip on his shoulder is grounding as Noct hunches over himself.

He’s never felt so sick. “I can’t.”

Ignis’ hand stays where it is. “Do you want me to do it?”

Noct knows that offer has a cost to the soul. He also knows Ignis and Gladio would dirty their hands for him if asked. He imagines his two friends, having tended Prompto so carefully the day before, being asked to turn that care to harm.

He can’t do that, either.

“Take me to him,” Noct says.

 

When Gladio opens the door cautiously and lights the lantern, Prompto has his back to them. He’s slouched over himself, and in the eerie light of the Bombs outside Noct can see that his back looks a lot like his chest does – split in two by a violet glow in a meandering line. The mark has spread further to the left than it was yesterday.

At this angle it’s easy to see the twist in Prompto’s once perfectly constructed spine. His breath hitches, and as Noct watches a spinal protrusion clicks into a new position beneath the skin.

He can see why he spent all night screaming.

The entire right half of his back is smouldering and purple. His shoulder has shifted and reshaped itself. It would have had to grind against bones. Noct can see the new shape of the blade, jutting out hard over his ribcage and rising to what looks like an Ereshkigal’s wing, only broader and wider. It hasn’t finished emerging.

“Are you going?” Prompto asks, his voice cracked. He rests his head back against the bars. “You should go.”

It’s so hard to think of anything to say. Noct moves to the wall, hoping to get a look at Prompto’s face and yet afraid of what he’ll see. He doesn’t recognise his own voice when he says, “You were wrong about the pain.”

“Yeah.” Prompto’s answer twists into a sob.

Noct holds out a hand to Ignis. “Hand me the satchel.”

Gladio glances at Ignis as he hands over the bag. The two say nothing, but Noct remembers the conversations, the arguments, the despair of the morning. He remembers telling them he wouldn’t do it, and Gladio using the words _scourge beacon_. He remembers Ignis musing that a few days’ medication might not be enough and offering to get more. He remembers Gladio’s moment of self-doubt, questioning whether Prompto was compos mentis enough to understand what they were doing or why.

Noct remembers the grief of accepting what he must do, because that’s still with him. It’ll always be with him.

Prompto has to drag himself away from the gate so that Noct can enter the cell. When Gladio steps forward to enter with him, Noct holds up his palm.

“It’s Prompto,” is all he says in response to Gladio’s frown.

Noct settles at Prompto’s feet. They’re tucked beneath his wizened legs, devastated by the infection. He couldn’t stand even if he wanted to.

Even the satchel doesn’t want him to do it. Noct struggles to find the vials in the darkness, though the capped syringes jump to his hand. When he finds the drugs he takes them out and lines them up in the hay.

One torture.

Two tortures.

Three tortures.

Noct takes the first one and jabs a needle into the cap, drawing up a dose. Then double a dose. Then as much as the syringe will take. _This one first_ , Ignis had said. _Give him a big enough dose of this and he won’t feel the others at all._

Noct’s mind is filled with the last time he let Prompto down and the look on his face as he fell from the train. The wrench of not being able to sleep for seeing it again and again. The not-knowing. He’d hated being prevented from going back for him by a duty he was born to, when all he wanted, what every cell had burned for, was to go searching Eos until he found either his companion or his corpse.

“You promised you’d always be at my side,” Noct forces. “This is practically treason.”

“I wanted to be.” Prompto’s laugh lilts. “That scourge, though.”

“You should be coming home.” It’s hard for Noct to control his breathing. “Fallen soldiers come home.”

He looks up at Prompto’s face. His friend blinks slowly back at him, the purple glow of his eyes coming and going as he does. In the light from the window Noct can see tendrils of miasma drifting upwards from the damaged shoulder.

And Prompto smiles. There’s no fear on his face this time.

His winged right arm is useless in his lap but he can reach for Noct’s shoulder with the left. He squeezes.

“But I got to see you again. Weather forecast for tomorrow: bright sunshine.”

The syringe blurs and Noct loosens his grip on it. He can’t find the words to tell Prompto that without him at his side the sun still might not rise.

“It’s okay. You should do it.” Prompto folds over with pain and Noct moves in, clutching him at the elbow and shoulder. The syringe drops to the floor.

Prompto’s voice is tremulous. “I want you to do it.”

Noct struggles to keep his composure. Not like this. Prompto deserves more than a drug overdose and a filthy hay bed.

This close, Noct can see that his friend’s wasted legs are in crown-issued Kingsglaive pants.

“You wanna put your jacket on?” Noct says as Prompto keens through the pain. “You’re a Glaive, aren’t you? Your king is here.”

 

Prompto can’t even balance on his legs anymore. He grasps at Gladio as he helps him to his feet, but Gladio doesn’t flinch.

“Ready?” he asks, when he’s got a solid grip. Prompto nods, and Gladio traps him to his side as he walks him out of the cell. Prompto’s feet turn in the hay, but it’s just for show. He doesn’t need to put the effort in.

Ignis shakes out the jacket. With Gladio’s help Prompto slips his left arm in, but they can’t do anything about his right. His shoulder is too disfigured. Ignis buttons the jacket down as well as he can with the shoulder protruding. Despite not being able to see, he finishes the dressing the way he always did – brushing down the back and over the shoulder to clear the black fabric of dust, and picking for fluff.

The floorboards creak as Gladio crouches next to Prompto. From his pocket he draws a well-worn package of photographs. It looks like there are some two hundred there and Noct recognises his own face on the top one, set against the backdrop of Perpetouss Keep.

“Some guy sent these to me,” says Gladio. “Blonde and short. Stupid-looking chin rug. You know him?”

“Nah.” Prompto grimaces and leans forward on his left elbow as pain swallows him again. “Sounds like he’s got real bad taste in facial hair.”

The men sit on the floor to look through the photographs. Noct flicks through them one by one, setting them out in nines on the floor for Prompto to see. It’s been an age for his friends, a third of their lives, yet they’re still able to share stories about most photographs. The uncapturable cactuar. Gladio with a book in the back of the car. Noct sleeping against his chocobo. Ignis mid-battle, his twin daggers lit blue.

“Pick one,” Gladio tells Prompto. “One with a landscape.”

They go through another eighteen photos before Prompto nods at one. “Top row… middle.”

“This one?” Noct points to a photograph of the four of them standing on a clifftop north of the Disc of Cauthess. The crystal stands elegantly behind them like the frozen crest of a wave. Ignis looks awkward, Gladio’s presence is hogging the shot, Noct seems distracted, and Prompto is half-hidden behind him with one foot off the ground.

“Always liked the Disc,” Prompto forces. “P-pity these four guys are standing in the way.”

“I look constipated,” Noct says. Prompto’s laugh feels like a reward.

“Dude, if I’d trashed every photo you looked constipated in…” He almost sounds like his old self, and if Noct closes his eyes he’ll be able to imagine Prompto in the front of the car, goading Ignis about coffee or driving like an oldie, or asking to pull over for a photo. Only with his eyes closed can he imagine even one more day like those days: days of driving around aimlessly, taking photos, giving it to the Empire, saving injured hunters.

Gladio crosses to the wall opposite. “I reckon the Disc is this way from here.” He presses the photo to the wall. The bright blue jutting crystal stands out even in the dim light of the lantern.

“I’d say slightly to the left,” Ignis says, and even though it shouldn’t be funny, it is. Ignis can’t see it to say which way it ought to shift. Even Prompto laughs, until he clutches his chest and his pain consumes what humour there was.

The wing pushes through the flesh a little more, trailing miasma down Prompto’s back until it evaporates into soot.

Gladio tucks the photo between two slats of wood, but it refuses to stay. Noct materialises a dagger and jams it into the photograph to keep it there. _Concentrate on the Disc_ , he tells himself. As Gladio turns to go back, Noct snatches his arm.

“Be my second?” he whispers. “If I slip—”

“You won’t slip,” Gladio murmurs back. “But I’ll be your second.”

With Ignis’ help, Prompto shifts backwards until he’s sitting as upright as he can. Noct crouches beside him. Tries to smile. Claps his hand on his good shoulder.

He wants to say something profound. He wants to tell his friend that he’s grateful that he signed up to be a Crownsguard just so they could spend more time together. For simply being himself, and never the fake he seemed to think he was. For being the guy who cried at the movies whenever they killed a dog, then pretended it was his contact lenses. For always being ready with a smile or a laugh, no matter how ready he really was.

They could have had so much more time. All those years lost between hefting up some shy kid who’d thought he was more worried about his camera than the fall, and when the same guy had bounced right on up to him and clapped him on the back like they’d known each other since kindergarten.

Noct pulls Prompto into his chest, clutching his shoulder. “You’re still clumsy,” he forces.

“Heh.” Prompto breathes hard into a hum before he says, “I let you down.”

“Never once,” Noct says, and he’s never meant anything more.

Noct grits his teeth and pulls away. He needs to show his misery to the back wall instead of his best friend.

He feels something grab his wrist. He can’t turn back: the tears are too many.

“Thank you.” Prompto kisses the back of Noct’s hand before letting go.

Noct turns to look at the picture of the Disc fixed to the wall. He lets his gaze lingers there: the four of them are just visible as stick figures against the blue. He can’t keep his eyes on it. He can’t do this without all of his concentration.

He senses Gladio come to his side and hears the greatsword materialise. Noct looks to him and nods. His isn’t the only damp face in the room.

Prompto’s back is curved before him, covered as much as possible in his Kingsglaive jacket. Noct counts the ribs he can see as he watches him breathe, notes the notches of his spine. It’s hard to tell exactly where the heart will be in Prompto’s new anatomy.

“It’s nice,” Prompto says. “It’s almost like we’re really there. Except… that soft focus. So wrong.”

Noct materialises his sword as quietly as he can.

Ignis manages to keep his voice level. “Just keep imagining that day.”

“Oh, I do. All of those days.”

Noct bites down on his jaw. Stills himself. Prays for accuracy. Lifts his hands.

“Hey, Noct?” Prompto says. “D’you remember when we—”

The blade shunks in to the hilt between Prompto’s fourth and fifth rib. He makes a strangled noise of surprise, and Noct hefts the sword upwards with both hands: he can’t let him suffer. He feels the sword cut through bone. The weight of it is too much for him as he pulls the blade swiftly out.

Prompto crumples. Miasma flows out of the wounds like blood.

For a moment Noct stands perfectly still, waiting for the minutest sign that Prompto is still alive.

His chest no longer moves.

His eyes no longer glow.

Ignis drops to Prompto’s side and takes off a glove. He places his fingers on his throat.

He nods twice, the first time seemingly to himself.

“It’s done,” he says unsteadily.

Ignis strokes the hair on the back of Prompto’s head. As though by that touch alone, his body starts to turn to ash and spores.

In less than a minute, there is nothing left to bury.

Noct drops to his knees. He focuses his whole self into the picture on the wall opposite: just four brothers on an everyday visit to the Disc. It’s something to look at while grief wells out of him, while his face grows cold, and until the sobs fold him in half.


	4. Three

The three-hour journey to Insomnia is taken in near-silence. Ignis asks if they need curatives. Gladio asks if Noct wants them to do anything en route. Other than that, Noct remembers no conversation at all.

The daemons clustering outside the hut had not been happy. Some of them had drifted away, seeming to understand that whatever they were waiting for wasn’t going to happen. The others had attacked them as soon as they’d stepped outside. That was all right. Noct was in the mood for a fight, directing his pain into the points of his daggers, or the edge of his sword. It’s how he survived the loss of his father and his love. There’s no point in changing his method for the loss of his best friend.  

 

Standing at the vehicle checkpoint of Insomnia, Noct is aware this will be the final time. It’s a realisation from afar that should have far more impact than it does.

He looks to the men on either side of him – his last remaining great loves.

“I can’t lose you in here,” he states. “Either of you.”

“Might have our work cut out without Prompto.” Gladio doesn’t look at them when he speaks. “He really put the work in while you were gone.”

Noct clenches his fists. His gaze drops to the flagstones and grit and grime on the ground. He can almost imagine what Prompto would say to that.

_N’aww. You really are just a big teddy bear aren’t you, big guy?_

"We will survive to get you to the Citadel, Noct,” Ignis says, straightening his jacket. “Even if it kills us to do so.”

“If it does, there won’t be anything left to sacrifice myself for,” Noct says.

“Then we’d better make sure it doesn’t.” Gladio materialises his sword.

This time when Noct dons the ring, there is no throb of power, no soul-deep pain. The strength he built in the crystal has given him the shoulders to bear what must be done.

 

It’s not lost on Noct how much his brothers have advanced in ten years. Ignis has gained strength and skill surpassing what he had before he lost his sight. Gladio has grown in force and spirit; he has every faith in Noct’s ability to lead, and that rallies him. What they have lost in Prompto they have gained in understanding: the grief belongs to none of them and all of them at once.

The Behemoth King is a challenge. Spines in its tail make a sudden lash from it deadly, and the wings are wide and thick enough to each station twenty men in a thunderstorm. It’s the first time Noct has to stop himself asking for Prompto’s support. He freezes for a moment, but as though Ignis has already sensed the misstep he moves closer.

“Ignis!” Noct turns to him. “I need you.”

“Then you shall have me,” Ignis says, casting a flask of Firaga straight into the face of the monster. It thrashes in rage, and Noct delivers it a blow so filled with his grief that it takes two steps backwards.

The Ariadne slows them but doesn’t stop them. She rears and weaves, body swaying and attempting to enchant. It’s the second time Noct tries to summon Prompto’s help. He always liked to give him a chance to get his own back on a bug. He hears the crack of Prompto’s guns behind him even though he knows they’re not there. Gladio’s shield comes down before him then, and he slashes the Arachne, severing a leg.

“Bugs,” is all Gladio says, but the crooked smile he and Noct pass between them is evidence they’re both thinking of the same thing: a blonde with a pathological dislike of any animal not cute or fluffy.

Noct almost falls to the Eternal Troopers of the Metro station. He’s momentarily distracted by memories of a lanky teenager in an unkempt shirt and school tie, wearing the most awful out-of-date glasses with a back-up prescription to match, choosing something to pipe through his earbuds. It’s enough of a distraction to permit a trooper to knock him off his feet. The troopers bear no similarity to that boy, last seen some fifteen years ago, but it’s he who comes to mind: standing on a train platform, hair whipped by the wind caused by an arrival.

Ignis helps Noct back to his feet as he remembers how to breathe. “Your Majesty. People will crowd the station again, but only by your grace.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” Noct says, bracing himself again and launching at an Eternal Trooper.

“I expect nothing less,” Ignis says, tossing a flask of Thundaga.

 

Not having Prompto means more regular rest stops. The one in the station is a haven without the lines of blue enchantment, a place to tune out all external stimuli as they rest. There is no chance of sleep, or food, but in each other there is sustenance.

“Tell me… who he was. These ten years.” Noct rubs a callous on his thumb. “I didn’t give him a chance to tell me himself.”

So Ignis and Gladio share stories of a man who’d learned how to be faithful and strong both, whose optimism could uplift the darkest dark. They tell him about a man who lived quietly in hope, a man who never gave up even when it would have been to his benefit to do so.

“Spent most of his spare time out at Hammerhead,” Gladio says. “Care to guess why?”

Noct smiles. “Now that’s a miracle even I couldn’t make for him.”

“I suspect they had an agreement, in the end,” Ignis muses. “Comfort in each other’s distant presence as a status quo that could only be lifted by a curse or a miracle.”

Gladio tells Noct of a man who would stand in the light of the hunter station at Hammerhead and cast through the 200 photographs he had from the ‘wild back-when times’. He’d always smile at a recollection, turning through the photos like a magician with a well-worn pack of cards.

“Nobody could reminisce like Prompto,” Gladio says. “He was one hell of a storyteller.”

“He could keep the chill off for hours with them.” Ignis locks his hands together. “Even I’d disappear into his fervour.”

“He learned how to take the focus off his insecurities. I’m glad.” Noct nods, and a little of the grief gets easier to bear. “He used to draw attention to failings no one else noticed.”

Ignis tells Noct of a man who made hooch in a still kept out behind the service station at Hammerhead, the kind of hooch you had to know was for sale and ask for from behind the counter. He had strict rules for provision: a bottle could only contain four shots, and could be gifted but not resold. It made for a good disinfectant in straitened times, and when medication or magic was lacking it had wound cleansing uses, too.

“As well as the obvious use, of course,” Ignis says.

“Not half bad in a pinch, either.” Gladio scrapes his boot on the concrete floor.

“You were lucky enough to miss the first ten batches.” Ignis says it like he can still taste them.

They tell of a man who rode shotgun with anyone who asked for help, hanging off the door and aiming a pistol into the darkness with one hand, or levelling a revolver out of the window from the crook of his elbow, like a cowboy from the old-time movies. There was a skull bumper sticker on his own hunter truck. It had ‘Good Time Guaranteed’ handwritten in silver ink around the edge.

Noct laughs. “He wasn’t wrong.”

As though Prompto is still there to chase away the chill with his honest joy for living, hours tick by as they talk.

“I’m sorry I missed it all.” Noct presses his lips together and rubs his mouth with a thumb. “I’d have loved that guy just as much as I do the guy I remember.”

He curls his finger to flick away his tears.


	5. Two

Noct and Ardyn face each other at the gates of the Citadel. Nothing in Noct so much as twitches while Ardyn talks of Ifrit, the Infernian. The same cannot be said when Ardyn ascends the steps into the Citadel.

Nonetheless, Noct’s time in Reflection has forged his rage into a weapon, one that will ascend with him and finish Ardyn when the time is right. He can’t allow himself to be distracted. If he does, all he’s loved and lost will be for nothing.

The astral is visible only as feet, until Noct looks skywards to see the whole of him sitting on his throne in flames of his own making, head resting on his hand in boredom. For now, he will settle on slaying the Pyreburner, as the Frostbearer asked him to when she gave him her blessing.

Ifrit’s opening attack catches him off-guard. Noct feels the burn through his clothes, in every inch of him, as though it’s cooking him from the inside. He hears Ignis call for him, but in his panic he can’t find him, losing himself in amber and red pain. In that moment, he feels something click over into surrender in his chest. He teeters, ready to hold out his arms and let the fire consume him.

_You can take the heat!_ He hears Prompto as though he were standing beside him. He knows it’s a trick of the mind, but it’s enough to centre him. Too much is at stake for him to surrender. In seconds, Gladio is there to put out the flames and drag him across to Ignis. The two form a human shield around him and it’s hard not to pull them in, to make the three of them smaller still.

Ignis deals Noct an Elixir to fix the damage, and he’s back in the fight.

The battle feels as though it goes on for days. Even coming to each other’s rescue is hard on such a large battlefield. Ifrit can cover long distances in seconds with a single footstep, distances it takes each of them minutes to run. Noct takes the battle to the air with warp strikes and point warps. As both his cherished friend and ranged weapon specialist, Noct feels Prompto’s loss again.

He burns through items, using them at the first sign his friends are at risk: potions, elixirs, Phoenix Down. He knows he should save some for his eventual battle with Ardyn, but his already thin tolerance to watching his loves suffer has flamed out.

The other astrals offer themselves for summons. Noct doesn’t hesitate. Leviathan, Titan, and Ramuh all launch attacks in turn, and each of them batters Ifrit as he continues to lash out, driven half-mad by the Starscourge lining his back and shoulder.

When Noct senses the icy tingle of Shiva’s offer to help, he feels affinity. It’s right that she be offered the opportunity to end Ifrit’s suffering, just as he was offered the opportunity to end Prompto’s. He watches as she casts Diamond Dust and freezes her love, before breaking him into icy dust with a kiss. It’s an act of love that Noct feels right at his core.

The gods can never truly die. Perhaps, for them, knowing that makes this kind of mercy more bearable.

 

When the three pause to rest this time, it’s in the guard house of the Citadel. A photograph on the control panel shows a man and his family: a wife and two daughters. It’s sobering. They haven’t seen another human in all of Insomnia. There probably hasn’t been anyone here for years. Scourge has taken any survivors of the war and turned them into heralds of death.

Chances are good that at most only one member of the family in the photograph is still alive.

Noct is propped on a guard’s stool, heels jammed against the tiles. He takes a lungful of air as though he’d forgotten until now. There’s so much unasked, so much that there wasn’t time to cover.

“Did Prompto have a family?”

Ignis doesn’t flinch as he says, “Only us.”

Gladio just nods, flexing his hand and wrist.

“You said you found him a few days before I saw him.” Noct thinks about the next question before he asks it, but there is no good way to phrase it. “How did you find out he was infected?”

So Ignis and Gladio tell Noct of a world where there are no smartphones and no postboxes, where the only communication with absent loved ones is through letters passed from hand to hand or welfare checks made by word of mouth. They tell him about a man who would send a simple note of ‘I am’ every week between meet-ups. They’d considered the first missed week simple chance – a fallen hunter in the chain, or a tipster’s moment of forgetfulness. The second missed week, one Ignis said had been crammed with _haven’t seen him_ s at Hammerhead, had been an alarm call. It was, without words, a summons to Lestallum.

“Not like that one to go quiet,” Gladio says, picking a scab on his hand.

Together they tell Noct of meeting up in the new Lucian capital, only to find that neither of them had heard from Prompto in weeks. They’d split and asked around for him, but even with Talcott’s help they could only establish that Cid had never received the package Cindy had sent down to him via Prompto more than two weeks before.

They tell him Dave has more work than he knows what to do with, but when told Prompto was missing he’d offered to put out a search and rescue instruction to the other hunters. He no longer had the time to deliver all the dog tags of the lost. The stress of that was in the twitch of an eye, the slowness of his movements, as he’d pushed a rusted tin across the table to them, a tin that sprouted hundreds of them.

“Prompto’s tag wasn’t among them.” Ignis keeps his blind gaze on the ground. “Gladio was very thorough.”

Word spread quickly in Lestallum. Holly came to their hotel room, telling them Prompto had been at the power plant about eight days before. He’d ended a couple of daemons frightening the ladies and causing damage in the basement. He’d looked tired and thin, she’d said, not his usual smiley self. He’d refused Holly’s offer of payment, just giving her a note to pass on to Cindy the next time she saw her:

_Thanks for letting me set up the still at your place. I’ve had a blast. I’m not going to be around for a while though, so if it’s no use to you, you can dismantle it._

_I’m sorry I didn’t deliver the goods to old Cid. Needs must, ya know?_

_Take care, girl. P xxx_

“Sent it up to her and asked her to keep on keeping on.” Gladio kicks some mud off his boot. “Figured if there was anywhere else he’d go, it’d be there.”

They tell Noct of Vyv, the man who had sustained Prompto’s dream of becoming a professional photographer even though there was no longer much of an audience. He’d held the biggest clue, and he brought it to the Leville without prompting. He’d told them that Prompto had dropped by only a week or so before and handed him a package for the two men, wrapped in newspaper and tied with a two half-hitch knot. Gladio still remembered teaching him the method for it on a tree branch.

Inside the package had been all of his photographs of the road trip, the letter they’d handed Noct on his return, and a note addressed to _Gladiolus Amicitia, Ignis Scientia, or both of these righteous men_. Prompto’s cursive had been fragmented, almost like he was using a pen that was running out of ink.

Ignis reaches into his inside jacket pocket and pulls the note out. It is carefully folded into four with two perfectly straight creases, but it has been folded and unfolded many times. The runkle of frequent handling has been pressed into and out of it. Noct realises as he takes it that even though Ignis can’t read it himself, the fabric of its presence in the universe is as much of comfort to him as the words it bears.

The note reads:

_Seems right that you should have these. Just wanted them to go to somebody who’d understand how important they are. Selfish of me, huh?_

_If you haven’t heard from me for a while, don’t worry. I’ll be fine. And if you see Noct before I do, could you give him the letter for me?_

_I love you guys. Thank you for, well… everything. Stay safe. P._

“It was obviously goodbye,” Ignis says. “Prompto could always hide his worries, but never his intentions.”

“But you didn’t take it at face value,” Noct says. His hands are respectful as he refolds the letter and presses it lightly into Ignis’ hand.

“No. We knew better,” Gladio says, his gaze on the note. “It’s why I opened your letter. Sorry.”

Noct lifts his palm in excusal. “I’m glad you did.”

Gladio tells Noct of how the search spread outside Lestallum and into Lucis. He tells him about Talcott and Iris visiting the few remaining livable outposts, the Coernixes and the hunter stations. They’d taken a photo from Prompto’s collection and asked the storekeepers and the refugees whether they’d seen this man. They’d told the shaking heads he was older now: _He has a soul patch, broader shoulders, and an indefatigable sense of optimism._ _You’ll know him if you see him. Please tell a hunter if you do._

The tips they’d had varied in quality, but eventually they’d been able to draw together a picture of Prompto’s last known movements.

A tip from the cashier at the Alstor Coernix placed Prompto there about six days before they found him hidden away. The cashier remembered because he’d traded his camera for a single CD and put a good knife and two boxes of bullets in the weapons co-operative.

“He gave up his camera.” It takes a second, but the delay only means it hits Noct harder. Prompto never went anywhere without his camera. It had led them both into dangerous places and situations, captured hundreds of precious moments that would otherwise be lost to capricious human memory. He’d likely spent ten years honing his craft, charting the descent of Eos into disease and darkness for posterity. There was no doubt that was the moment Prompto realised he could never come home.

Noct catches two tears, and forgives himself the rest.

Gladio and Ignis tell him that four days before they found him, Prompto’s usual truck was found empty on the roadside between the Nebula Wood and the Malacchi Hills. Since hunters have a pool of them there’d been no guarantee he was the last to drive it, but Gladio recognised it from the description given by the hunter who reported it. _There’s a skull sticker on the back bumper_ , he’d said. _Was a note by the gear shift, too._

The hunter had handed them the note, torn from the same pad as the others and written in an even less tidy scrawl.

_Lady A,_

_Hope you’re holding out okay. Just a slightly self-conscious, weird and completely unsolicited note to say thanks for putting me on the right path in Niflheim all those years ago. Couldn’t have survived the decade without it._

_Also that there might not be any hooch for a while. Sorry. Someone’ll kick up the still again soon, I betcha._

_Be careful out there,_

_‘Shortcake’ (You know, you’re the only person to ever give me a nickname)._

Gladio’s smile is fond. “Aranea offered her services for free once she saw that.”

“It was she who found him,” Ignis says. “We went immediately to give him what succour we could, but…” He tilts his head in lieu of closure. His Adam’s apple bobs.

Noct doesn’t need Ignis to finish. He knows he’s the only cure for the scourge. If he’d harboured any doubt about his mission on leaving Angelgard, now there is none. He must defeat Ardyn. If he doesn’t there will be more sufferers like Prompto, more deaths, more of his people’s loved ones living only as part of a montage in a photograph. He won’t let anyone else lock themselves away in an effort to starve themselves to death, to prevent others from contracting the blight. If Noct gives up everything, nobody else will have to.

Perhaps this is the moment when he really, truly, accepts that his life will end tomorrow. Perhaps, in the musty guard’s room, with friends and dust surrounding him, there’s even a moment where he looks forward to it. He’s not alone here and he won’t be alone there. There are others waiting for him in the hereafter.

Noct raises his chin when he stands. “Let’s go. Don’t want Ardyn’s nerves getting the better of him before I can finish him off.”


	6. One

The elevator is too fast in its shaft. Noct wants it to slow, because every second it takes is one closer to parting with Ignis and Gladio. He thanks the astrals for allowing him to get this far with two of his friends still at his side. Standing there, the three are tense and quiet.

The thrum of the elevator is familiar and cocooning, almost as though if they stay inside it the world will stay just the same as it was on the day they left the Citadel for the road trip – except that they’re a party of three and not a party of four.

Noct jabs a finger into the emergency stop. Even after ten years, exquisite Lucian engineering brings the elevator to a cushioned halt. There’s a moment of pressure as their bodies strain at the forces expressed against them.

“What are you doing?” Gladio asks from the corner, both hands on the sides of the elevator.

“Noct?” Ignis holds tightly to the rail. “What is it?”

“I just…” Noct says, but instead of turning to his friends he talks to the join where the elevator doors meet. He puts his hand on it. Presses his forehead to the back of his hand. Just rests there a moment. When he turns, his fists are tightly clenched.

“With Prompto… With what happened, I haven’t really spoken to you two.”

The men don’t try to fill Noct’s extended silence.

If Noct has learned anything from losing Prompto, it’s that he can’t waste opportunities to say what he means. Some things, things that are impossible to express with spoken words – the loyalty to these two that moves his hands and body in manifestation of it, the warmth generated by a love for them that he’s sure will transcend the body he leaves behind, the feel of their firm guidance and faithful all-or-nothing hearts – must be uttered now or never heard.

“I’ve… made my peace,” Noct says. “I know, and understand, what I have to do.” He turns, because, king or friend, when addressing loved ones you should always look them in the eye. From the looks on their faces, it’s the last thing they expected now.

Noct only has now. He doesn’t have a tomorrow. He’s barely had a yesterday.

“Being here with you, now. Knowing this is it…” Noct watches as Gladio lowers his head, and Ignis remains rigid. The lump in Noct’s throat won’t be swallowed. “It’s more than I can take.”

“Huh,” Gladio says. “You spit it out.”  He palms a tear.

“It’s good to hear.” Ignis doesn’t chase his own tears as they spatter onto his lapel. It’s the only noise in the elevator.

Noct searches his expensively educated vocabulary. Constructs sentence after sentence in his mind. But none of them are right. The words he chooses aren’t a settlement: they indicate that there is more than can ever be said, around a hundred thousand campfires, on every plane of existence.

“Well, what can I say?” He smiles, his own face damp. “You guys… are the best.”

When he catches up with Prompto, Noct will tell him so, too.

He disengages the emergency stop button with gritted teeth once his vision clears. The elevator hums into life, carrying him closer to the throne room of the Chosen King.

 

When they stand outside the throne room, Noct looks up at the doors.

“Looks smaller,” he says.

“You’ve grown some.” Gladio looks up at the frame of the doors, ten feet above the floor. In the glory days, two men would have pushed them open for every dignitary. 

“We all have,” Ignis says.

Noct turns to his friends. “Gladio. You still have those photos?”

Gladio’s hand goes to his pocket. “You want them?”      

The photographs feel heavy in Noct’s hands. He’s holding his history, his favoured days. His entourage had shrunk to three brothers, his once expansive home to a four-seater car. The living then had been honest, and whole-hearted, even as he tussled with loss.

There’s no deliberation. He knows which photograph he wants over his heart. Flicking through them he finds the one with a notch cut out of the top where it’d been jammed into place with a dagger: a photograph of four young men with the Disc of Cauthess behind them. They will all be with him, in the end.

When he pushes the doors open, he sees the gaudy marionettes of his lost hanging from chains above him. First to jump to his attention is his father. Then Luna. Then Prompto. The latter is still too fresh, too new, so Noct’s gaze drops to Ardyn. He has a foot on the throne.

“Off my chair, jester. The king sits there.”

Ardyn smirks in response, but Noct isn’t fast enough to stop the dark light that makes its way to the throats of Gladio and Ignis. Before he can act, it floors them, their gurgled breaths rattling in Noct’s ears.

“What did you do?!”

“They have no place in this, the battle of kings!” Ardyn calls. He says more, but Noct doesn’t hear it. In the quiet left by Ardyn’s showy exit, he hears their breaths, watches their chests move. They’re not dead. It’s as much of a comfort as Noct will ever receive on this plane of existence.

When Noct leaves the throne room and finds Ardyn on the streets of Insomnia, they don’t hesitate to lock swords. Ardyn never stops taunting. When he’d done that in Zegnautus Keep, Noct had found it hard to bite his tongue. His constant provocation had been secondary to the gnawing worry that drove Noct through the keep, the concern that Prompto really was dead.

This time Noct barely notices the taunts. He knows them for what they are: the desperate thrashings of a man in pain.

_Do you like what I’ve done with the world? I twisted it all, just for you._

Instead of responding, Noct concentrates on his mission to relieve Ardyn of his suffering, blade slash by blade slash.

_A King in name alone. I’m truly disappointed. Can’t you do any better than that? Ten years, and nothing to show for it!_

The man in the hat had once been a good man. One who’d done the best he could for his people, who’d accepted their burdens into his own body.

_Does it hurt? The pain is proof you’re mortal._

They are the same, he and Ardyn, Noct thinks. The only difference between them is that Noct had people to love him and build him, sometimes to their own detriment: beloveds who moved their worlds to make him more comfortable in his own and welcome in theirs.

_Oh, this… will be the very death of me._

Noct can’t imagine the ostracisation and hatred that would turn a good man towards a dark path. He’s never been given anything but love.

_Even were the dawn to break now, it would only bring the horrors to light!_

Nonetheless, he’s suffering. He knows he must maintain and win this battle, or the dark hatred that inhabits Ardyn will escape and destroy the whole world. In an attempt to increase his chances at winning, he takes the battle to the air – but Ardyn follows all too easily.

By the time they fall back down to the earth Noct can hardly breathe, curatives and pocketed mementos aside.

“A war… of attrition, then,” pants Ardyn. He looks too happy about that.

The familiar glow of the fallen kings of Lucis draws around them. Ardyn examines them coolly. “The kings of yore are on hand… calling you forth. To oblivion.”

Tired and worn, they go at it again, part lovers, part enemies. Their fates are entwined like day and night, the balance of power between them as fragile as sylleblossoms.

Their blades clash. Ardyn tips his head close.

“Yet when your father died, you were off playing with your friends.” He doesn’t pause as he goads. He’s busy looking for an opening, and Noct knows not to give him one. The point made is a flick knife to the heart: that’s exactly how it was. Noct didn’t even show his father the respect he deserved on leaving the Citadel. He can still remember how hard his father tried to impress his love upon him that last time. He’d known it would be their last meeting. He’d given him all the advice he could. With his last acts he’d catapulted his only son into the world beyond the wall, the one last place where he might know safety and love.

“When your beloved died, you lay watching, powerless to stop it.”

That was true, too. He’d been too afraid of Leviathan to control her, too inexperienced to slay a god that didn’t want to go easy. He’d been in the wrong place, at the wrong time, when he should have been at Luna’s side to protect her from Ardyn’s dagger. Even as he’d lay dying, the odour of his own congealing blood overpowering, Luna had used her last breaths to rescue him. She had loved and guided him then, as she always had. He hadn’t protected her. That was his fault, and his loss to bear.

“Well,” Ardyn says. “At least I gave you the opportunity to be more hands-on with your best friend.” His smile is as kinked as his heart. “A ten-year incubation period for him too, yes? Had to do something to stave off the boredom while I waited for you at the keep!”

It hurts to know that Prompto was sickening the entire time Noct was away, even if he probably didn’t know it himself. Noct carries that new wound carefully, but doesn’t favour it in case it prevents his parries and his thrusts. As much as he should be full of wrath at the invasion of his friend’s body, he can’t be anymore. Those fires are for men who have time to stoke them.

Instead, he’s grateful he was the one asked to relieve Prompto of his pain. Grateful that Prompto consented, but more, that he asked for help. Noct’s strike was true, and death instant. Another man might not have been so kind.

"I was so close... so very close to taking all those friends of yours... and making them into daemons,” Ardyn says, but the gibe is shallow. He knows his mockery isn’t having any effect. Those other friends still live. Noct’s faith and love will ensure that continues into sunrise.

“You think ten years is a long time? It is nothing to me! I have lived in darkness for ages!”

Noct takes the opening made by Ardyn’s own wrath, and digs his sword deep. He feels Ardyn’s body give in on the end of the blade. He drops back.

“So… that is how you would end it.”

Noct crouches beside Ardyn. He can’t bring himself to hate this crumbled man anymore, in spite of everything. He remembers Prompto’s compassion: _it’s nice not to have to kill anything._ He offers Ardyn that compassion now as he reassures him that he can close his eyes and rest in the peace his own people never gave him.

“I will await you… in the beyond.” Ardyn closes his eyes, his body tangling in the wind as it dissolves.

 

It’s no small matter to leave Gladio and Ignis at the bottom of the stairs to the Citadel. Noct knows they’ll have to work hard to survive as they carve safe passage for him. But they have each other. All he can do is hope that’s enough. This is the last time he will see them for some time. Noct wonders, briefly, how time must pass in the beyond. He won’t have to wait long to find out.

“Gladio. Ignis. I leave it to you. Walk tall…my friends.” He salutes them, and they him. They’ve already walked tall and earned every gram of his faith. Noct has no doubt they will continue to. The world couldn’t be in safer hands.

He can’t let himself be distracted by the noise of the daemons coming to life behind him. The walk to the front doors of the Citadel is long and steep. With every step, he leaves a little more of his ego behind. He must shed his skin to undergo Ascension.

The arm of the throne is cold under Noct’s palm. He feels the cold rise up through him as he sits. He’s tired. Time to rest.

“I love you all. Luna. Guys. Dad. The time we had together, I cherish.”

No progression can be made without acknowledgement of lessons learned. No king ever ascended without standing on the shoulders of giants.

He closes his eyes. Takes another moment. Another breath.

“Kings of Lucis.” Noct’s eyes snap open. “Come to me!”

He’s been hurt in battle before. He knows pain, both of body and mind. Each blow of the past kings is an agony of both, but in sacrifice there is righteousness. It is tolerable because it is transitory.

His father is reticent to strike the final blow and end the suffering. He understands this. It’s not the same, but he was reticent with Prompto, too. When he lifts the handle of their shared blade, he asks that his father trust in him. And he trusts his father, as Prompto had trusted him. As his father dons his armour and rises before him, Noct lifts his head. Neither of them have any reason to feel shame. This is as it must be done.

As the sword hits home, Noct senses the steel in his body for only a few moments, before adrenaline follows. Darkness creeps in from the corner of his vision, eroding the living world for the last time.

When he descends into the life stream, he opens his eyes to find Ardyn waiting for him, as promised. The ancient would-be king bows, grinning darkly, and doffs his hat. It’s hard to see Ardyn here and know that he must fight him to the death, again, just the two of them and the life stream.

Noct doesn’t know what more he can do.

He thinks he imagines the hand that rests on the small of his back. It’s not until he turns to his left that he sees Prompto’s crooked grin. Noct’s best friend stands upright now, and broad, his Kingsglaive uniform as perfect as his body is whole. His words go straight to Noct’s chest: _ever at your side_.

Noct feels relief and then resolve flood him. He’s not alone, not even here. That thought brings the memory of others to flank him: Gladio, Ignis, his father. Luna’s love wasn’t enough to cleanse Ardyn of the scourge, but it’s enough to distract him as she attempts to heal him once more. The golden light of her touch is enough to make the scourge-bearer flail, to bring the poison to the surface of his skin and weaken him.

The past kings of Lucis reclaim their weapons from the messenger sheath that brought them to the other side. Their withdrawal makes deadly angel wings of Noct’s back. Feeling himself fragment and burn, the King of Kings lays down his judgement on his fallen great-uncle: peace, at last. For both of us.

As Noct’s second, ethereal body fades, the hand on his back and the words of his best friend are the last thing to follow him into the beyond. _You did good, buddy. See you soon._


	7. Zero

Noct didn’t miss the sunlight for ten years in the way his people did. Nonetheless, the warmth of it on his face is a blessing, as is the woman at his side. He hands Luna the photograph he brought with him to the afterlife: well-loved paper bearing well-loved men. _Here are those stoics I was telling you about. Here are the giants upon whose shoulders I stood._

When Luna takes the photograph, she smiles, infected by his love for them. She turns the photo to Noct and taps the image of Prompto. “You should introduce us.” 

Before Noct can respond, a throat is cleared at the bottom of the staircase to the throne.

“See, now, I wondered when that was going to happen,” Prompto says, in full Kingsglaive attire. “Own up, Noct. You haven’t even noticed me standing here, have you?”

Noct grins at Luna. “Don’t encourage him.”

“Who, me? Since when did I need encouraging?” Prompto indicates himself with the pointed fingers of both hands. “I can encourage myself! Okay, so I might maybe have had a letter from a lady and that might just be why I got the best friend ever and may be a little bit why I’m here now but it’s okay, I don’t mind…”

Luna inclines her head, and offers her hand to Prompto.

“Really?” Noct says, but doesn’t bother to correct the smile to match the sternness.

“I…had a big speech planned out, but I ramble when I’m nervous and I didn’t really expect it to be like this because I just really wanted to thank you and now I’m going on but the sound of my own voice is better than no sound at all, so I just figure if I keep talking you’ll get it and it’ll all be okay, and then—”

Noct has already descended the stairs. He flings his arms around Prompto’s shoulders, squeezing until the hug is returned and his friend’s nerves are quieted.

Luna’s approach is understated as she lifts her hem to descend the stairs. She treads carefully to Noct’s side. Her hug is smaller, but just as firm and loving.

“I think we’ve moved beyond introductions, O rescuer of my strays,” she says, and kisses Prompto’s cheek.


End file.
